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Personal life 1) Childhood

Personal life

1) Childhood

Jacintha Buddicom‘s account Eric & Us provides an insight into the Blair’s childhood. She quoted his sister Avril that «he was essentially an aloof, undemonstrative person» and said herself of his friendship with the Buddicoms «I do not think he needed any other friends beyond the schoolfriend he occasionally and appreciatively referred to as ‘CC'». Cyril Connolly provides an account of Blair as a child in Enemies of Promise. Years later, Blair mordantly recalled his Prep School in the essay «Such, Such Were the Joys«, claiming among other things that he «was made to study like a dog» to earn a scholarship, which he alleged that was solely to enhance the school’s prestige with parents. Jacintha Buddicom repudiated Orwell’s schoolboy misery described in the essay, stating that «he was a specially happy child».

Connolly remarked of him as a schoolboy, «The remarkable thing about Orwell was that alone among the boys he was an intellectual and not a parrot for he thought for himself». At Eton, John Vaughan Wilkes his former headmaster’s son recalled, «…he was extremely argumentative — about anything — and criticising the masters and criticising the other boys…. We enjoyed arguing with him. He would generally win the arguments — or think he had anyhow.» Roger Mynors concurs: «Endless arguments about all sorts of things, in which he was one of the great leaders. He was one of those boys who thought for himself….»

Blair liked to carry out practical jokes. Buddicom recalls him swinging from the luggage rack in a railway carriage like an orang-utang to frighten a woman passenger out of the compartment. At Eton he played tricks on John Crace, his Master in College, among which was to enter a spoof advertisement in a College magazine implying pederasty. Gow, his tutor, said he «made himself as big a nuisance as he could» and «was a very unattractive boy». Later Blair was expelled from the crammer at Southwold for sending a dead rat as a birthday present to the town surveyor. In one of his As I Please essays he refers to a protracted joke when he answered an advertisement for a woman who claimed a cure for obesity.

Blair had an enduring interest in natural history which stemmed from his childhood. In letters from school he wrote about caterpillars and butterflies. and Buddicom recalls his keen interest in ornithology. He also enjoyed fishing and shooting rabbits, and conducting experiments as in cooking a hedgehog or shooting down a jackdaw from the Eton roof to dissect it. His zeal for scientific experiments extended to explosives — again Buddicom recalls a cook giving notice because of the noise. Later in Southwold his sister Avril recalled him blowing up the garden. When teaching he enthused his students with his nature-rambles both at Southwold and Hayes. His adult diaries are permeated with his observations on nature.



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